Monthly Archives: April 2017

“This is a summary of my professional experience in the artworld. Add all of these accomplishments together and multiply that sum by 20 (rejections); and you may arrive at 25% of the rejections that I have received by putting my art out into the world.

I have sent it to you to underline that your film festival selection of my movie in 2014 was my worst experience in 33 years in the art world. You are young. I hope you learn a lesson from this experience.

A series of sketches that are the first improvisations of a creation myth character based on Mbombo, the creator god in the religion and mythology of the Kuba of Central Africa, who creates the world by vomiting it up.Wikipedia. This new project, CREATION, is a prequel to my Harpy and Cape Experiments videos.

My first (and only completely finished) novel was rejected by 65 agents. I had no intention of either quitting writing ​or waiting for my writing to go public. Briefly, I decided to turn my writings into performance pieces and finally committed myself to studying acting (which I should have done in college instead of studying art) and simultaneously committed myself to playwriting classes for almost 8 years. For me, workshopping – i.e., putting my in-progress plays on their feet in front of audience – is at least number two in importance to my development as an artist (living the long road of developing as an actor definitely being number one). I was a professional and very prolific theater artist for almost 20 years and being so in the habit of workshopping, have used YouTube, Vimeo and other venues for that very purpose – progressing on a project through a process of creating and uploading pre-production story and character development videos.One of the reasons why I never tried to get any kind of Actors’ Equity standing is that most of my work – solo performance of my own one woman plays – was presented in alternative and or small theater that could never afford to get an Equity waiver for one solo performance run that probably was not going to bring in a lot of cash for the theater – i.e., I might not have been able to perform my own plays if I’d been in the Union. So perhaps it’s understandable that I find unreasonable and archaic that so many film festivals turn their noses up at microbudget/no budget arthouse movies made by self represented artists who’ve released their own work or made it viewable on YouTube, Vimeo, etc.

An improvisation inspired by the claustrophobic experiences that I often had when I regularly auditioned, usually feeling a good deal more intimidated trying to keep my sanity in the waiting room than I was auditioning for people who often seemed disappointed before I even opened my mouth to read or give my monologue. I also used this as a composition exercise to further explore the problem of creating depth in the background of a greenscreened scene.

This new video is entitled “VEILED”: three mysterious, partially obscured women, who are apparently oblivious of each other, simultaneously and incoherently address an invisible audience. Triads of magical females with power over life, death, fate and men- have haunted mythology and religion throughout history. Humans have worshipped, revered, feared, loved and hated mysterious female energy:Gorgons, Norns, Moirai, Charites, Erinyes, Morrígan, Sirens, Heliades, Muses, Hesperides, Fates in Western culture; Iyabás in Yoruban religion; Tridevi, Devi Shakti and Pussa in Asia.